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November 7, 2013

[After
decades of political upheaval and paralysis, Nepal is scheduled to hold national elections on Nov. 19. Yet,
with more than a dozen political parties — including an important Maoist group
— boycotting the vote, there is some doubt that they will occur, but top
officials say the country has no choice.]

Hisila Yami, candidate of the
Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the wife of a

former Nepali prime minister, Baburam
Bhattarai, talked to voters during her door-to-door

campaign.

KATMANDU, Nepal—Nepal’s former first lady
insisted that she was not a crook.

“If you read the newspapers, you’d think I was the most
corrupt woman in Nepal,” said Hisila Yami, a Maoist leader and the wife of a
former prime minister, Baburam Bhattarai.

Now that the Maoists have given up bank robbery, kidnapping
and extortion, money is harder to come by, she acknowledged as she peeled off
bills from a huge wad in her purse to give to campaign workers.

“People gave us money earlier out of fear, but they don’t
do that now,” she said with a shrug. “We have to be appealing now. We have to
be nice. We can’t afford to antagonize people now.”

So Ms. Yami was squinting at shadows recently as she held
campaign gatherings in living rooms darkened by routine power failures. She
insisted to those gathered about her feet that all the stories of hidden wealth
and secret efforts to undermine her husband when he was in office were just
vicious rumors.

“People think I had a lot of money, cars and homes, but
that is not true,” she said, exuding an energetic charisma that lit up the room
like a flashlight. “When my husband was prime minister, I tried to help him.
But people think I tried to overtake him.”

After decades of political upheaval and paralysis, Nepal is scheduled to hold national elections on Nov. 19. Yet,
with more than a dozen political parties — including an important Maoist group
— boycotting the vote, there is some doubt that they will occur, but top
officials say the country has no choice.

“There is no Plan B,” said Madhab Paudel,
Nepal’s minister of information and communication. “We have no
option except conducting the election.”

There is a growing consensus here that the only way to
arrest the country’s disastrous economic spiral is through elections. More than
120 political parties have registered to compete, and hope — long in as short
supply as oxygen on nearby Mount
Everest — is flourishing. Some of
the most colorful candidates in the world are now crisscrossing this
mountainous nation.

Nepal, ruled for centuries by monarchs, has 125 ethnic groups,
127 spoken languages, scores of castes and three distinct ecosystems that have
long divided its 27 million people into a blinding array of feuding
communities, making political consensus difficult.

A 10-year civil war between the Maoists and the government
ended in 2006, but the resulting Constituent Assembly spent four years trying
to write a constitution without success, leading to political paralysis. This
month’s election is intended to create a second Constituent Assembly to finish
the constitution.

The election’s most intriguing subplot is among the
Maoists, who divided last year over whether war is still an acceptable
political strategy. The hard-line faction, widely referred to as Dashist because
of a dash in its name (Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist), is boycotting the
elections and has called for a 10-day strike beginning Nov. 11.

“Our intention is to prevent people from participating in
the election,” said Pampha Bhusal, a Dashist politburo member.

Just how far Ms. Bhusal’s group will go to prevent voting
is the season’s great mystery. Ms. Bhusal insisted that her party will not
resort to violence again, but instead will seek to “convince” people not to
vote.

“Everybody’s one concern is security, which is
unpredictable,” said Ila Sharma, a commissioner on Nepal’s Election Commission. One candidate has already been
killed.

And then there is Ms. Yami’s party, the Unified Communist
Party of Nepal (Maoist), whose nickname is the Cashist party because of the
vast sums of money, cars, houses and property its leaders are rumored to have
stolen during the country’s 10-year insurgency. Like rich Communists elsewhere,
Cashists have become deeply attached to capitalism. “Even in China, capitalism is thriving in its own way,” Ms. Yami said.

While Nepal’s main parties disagree fiercely over many things, Ms.
Yami said, the embrace of democracy is now widely shared. “Usually the
hard-core Communists don’t go for things like bourgeois elections,” she said
with a laugh. “We were just in the jungle four or five years ago, and now we’re
sounding more democratic than the democrats.”

But the tentative nature of Nepal’s democracy means that bribery and extortion, common tools
during the insurgency, have not disappeared. In interviews, businessmen in Nepal said they routinely received letters demanding money from
political parties, some of which still maintain private armies. If they refuse
to pay — required donations range from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on the size
of the business — they are told they will suffer serious vandalism or violence,
they said.

“The consequence is as simple as it is dramatic,” said one
top Nepali businessman who asked to remain anonymous for fear of spurring
further violence. “They will disrupt your business, damage your property and
perhaps do violence to you and your employees. They’re fairly open about it
when they need to be.”

Neel Kantha Uprety, the country’s chief election
commissioner, said that vote buying was widely accepted in Nepal, and that eliminating the practice would take time and
education. “We do not have a culture of democracy,” Mr. Uprety said.

The principal disagreements among the parties are whether
to adopt the American, French or British governance models and how to split the
country into states.

The Cashists want an executive presidency similar to that
in the United
States,
although none would admit to copying the United States since, well, they are Maoists. The Marxist-Leninists want
a French system with shared power between a president and prime minister, but
they, too, denied any hint of foreign influence.

“We don’t call it a French model,” said Pramesh Hamal, a
leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist). “But you can
explain it yourself as near to the French model.”

Whether the parties will reconcile these divergent visions
in the next Constituent Assembly after failing to do so in the last is
anybody’s guess. In multiple interviews, Nepalis expressed a mixture of hope
and despair about their future.

“It’s all a mess,” Sajan Shakya, 22, said as he sat with a
friend near one of Nepal’s ancient Hindu temples.

But Gopal Tamkakar, a 58-year-old merchant, said he was
optimistic. “Things will be calmer once they draft a constitution,” he said.
“You have to have hope.”

A struggle for influence between India and China is another of the election’s subtexts. The Maoists, who
had the most seats in the previous assembly, favor China. The Nepali Congress party favors India. In a wide-ranging interview, Ms. Bhusal of the Dashists
repeatedly denounced India’s influence over the coming elections.

“Every decision now is being made by an international
power,” she said with some fervor. Which power? “India! They are all acting on behalf of India!”

Nepal has enormous potential as a source ofhydroelectricpower, something both India and China covet. But the country has been in disarray for so long
that diplomats in Katmandu rolled their eyes at the oft-expressed fear that some
foreign power is itching to take Nepal over.

Nonetheless, India plays a dominant role. Bollywood movies are wildly popular,
tens of millions of ethnic Nepalis live in India and the country depends entirely on India for fuel and other necessities. But Nepal’s time zone is 15 minutes ahead of India’s, a telling indicator of the country’s fierce attachment
to its own independence.

International aid organizations have poured into Nepal in recent months, hoping this election may finally serve
as a national turning point. On any given day, the traffic circle in front of
the Nepal Election Commission is clogged with giant S.U.V.s sporting the
emblems of many national aid agencies — including China’s.

Many of these organizations have helped resolve significant
technical challenges. Quickly retrieving ballot boxes from the highest
elevations in the world will be no small feat. And since half of Nepalis are
illiterate, paper ballots have become poster-sized collections of symbols:
rabbit, butterfly, flashlight and soccer ball, among more than 100 others.

The Chinese have not provided technical assistance, “since
their own experience with elections is limited,” Mr. Uprety said with only the
barest smile. “But we are getting their best wishes along with their logistical
support.”